Ed. note: I’m publishing this a day early because I spent all day today at minnebar and I’ll be spending all day tomorrow at the Dalai Lama’s Minnesota Visit 2011. Next week’s going to be pretty light as well—it’s The Radiators last stand and I intend to partake mightily.
ESRD
One in six dialysis patients don’t understand health information that they need to know about. University of Pittsburgh researchers under the direction of Jamie Green found that 41 of the 260 dialysis patients (16 percent) studied had “limited health literacy, which refers to the ability to obtain, process, and understand health information in order to make appropriate health decisions.” The study will appear in the May issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Law
After several US government raids on suspected child porn targets netted innocent neighbors with open WiFi networks instead of criminals, at least one judge has seen the folly of trying to attach an IP address to an individual. A US federal judge in Illinois, Harold Baker, has rejected attorney John Steele’s standard request for expedited discovery to match IP addresses with individuals. As Nate Anderson, writing for Ars Technica, reports, Baker rejected Steel’s request for leave to an appeals court, “saying it was totally improper to do expedited discovery against anonymous individuals with no representation of their own before the court.”
Media
In a first, the New York Times, used the word “torture” in a news story—a headline—no less. But only online. The online edition of the story by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage carried the headline “Bin Laden Raid Revives Debate on Value of Torture,” while the print edition headline was dialed considerably back: “Harsh Methods of Questioning Debated Again.” The Times, until now, has been steadfast in not using the t-word except when quoting someone directly. It was a policy that Clark Hoyt, the paper’s former public editor, outlined in April 2009. Only when you read Shane and Savage’s story do you learn that the original Times policy remains in full force. While the word “torture” does, indeed, appear throughout the article, it’s never used as a descriptor of what actually happened. Why does this even matter? As Jay Rosen succinctly tweeted, “Because calling things by their right names is basic to truthtelling. Basic.” To make things even crazier, the Times’ editorial page actually uses “torture” as an active descriptor.
Recognizing that analysis of disclosed data is a keystone of journalism, the Wall Street Journal has launched SafeHouse, its WikiLeaks competitor/pretender. There will certainly be others. None of them will displace WikiLeaks until there’s either a US federal shield law or strengthened individual state shield laws. Sources can upload files using the Journal‘s public Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption key using traffic-masking software like Tor. Except, as Gregory Ferenstein, writing for Fast Company reports, Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum tweeted that he tried to leak information to the Journal about its SafeHouse security flaws, but couldn’t get the Tor interface to work. Add to this that the Journal‘s published policy includes the statement, “We reserve the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities,” and SafeHouse is clearly not ready for prime time.
Politics
Need more evidence that Minnesota has gone from bucolic to just plain mean in less than a generation? House Majority Leader Matt Dean (R-52B) calls author Neil Gaiman a “pencil-necked little weasel who stole US$45,000 from the state of Minnesota.” I had dinner once with Gaiman in the early 1990s. He’s neither pencil-necked nor a weasel. Then I started reading his work (the novels, not the graphic novels) and he became one of my favorites. Dean’s referring to Gaiman’s speaking fee to appear at the Stillwater Library on a Sunday afternoon last year. Gaiman is an author and clearly warns on his website that if you want to hire him to speak, he’s willing but it’s not going to be cheap. I’ve never yet met a real writer who wouldn’t rather be home writing than off on a speaking gig somewhere. He gave the money—less agent’s fees, natch—away to two small charities. Nick Pinto, writing for City Pages, scored a good interview with Gaiman and Dean’s mom made him sort of, kind of apologize the next day. Gaiman responded in a predictably stunning fashion, dropping the news that Harper Collins is reissuing American Gods, “with the author’s preferred text. It’s about 12,000 words longer than the original version.”
Technology
This is indeed the week for data visualization breakthroughs. SocialFlow has an absolutely incredible visualization of how news of the death of Osama Bin-Laden percolated across the Twitterscape from a single point of origin.
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